System Finale: An Apocalyptic Space Opera LitRPG (The System Apocalypse Book 12) by Tao Wong

Author:Tao Wong [Wong, Tao]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Starlit Publishing
Published: 2022-02-28T16:00:00+00:00

***

Two days of walking pretty much in a straight line up. Of course, we’re not actually walking upward but in a sort of weird angular circle. We gather more and more people on the periphery, members of the Galactic Council who have managed to make it to the city below us and scrambled to get here. The only reason they’re double the number and not triple is because they keep losing people, either dropping out of Xaxas’s cloud or, in more dire cases, disappearing.

Realistically, they should never have sent their Basic Classes. This environment, this entire planet isn’t geared for Basic Classes. They have to be carefully managed, run through Dungeons and on patrols of pre-cleared grounds, to survive. There’s a reason why people don’t generally drag Basic Classes to Dungeon Worlds or Forbidden Planets and it has a lot to do with the casualty rates.

It tells me a little about how desperate they are to keep tabs on us. And how far they’re pushing their people that the Basic Classes chose to come out, rather than rebel. Or perhaps it’s just how much they hate us. Or believe in what they’re doing.

In either case, they’ve switched out Basic Classes for Advanced and even a bunch of Master Classes. It’s made our walk a little tenser but not that much. Until they manage to get Heroics in play, we’re safe enough. And if they do deploy Heroics, Xaxas’s cloud gives us enough time to get ready.

Not that our readiness requires much beyond the mental and emotional. Environmental advantages are rather slim where we were, so I’m more than a little relieved when we get out and into the open sky. The feeling of millions of tons of earth pressing down on us, illuminated only by artificial light, has been a shadow on my mind.

Bright sky. Finally. Sort of.

Coming out of the bore hole, we emerge at the bottom of a ravine, one so deep I can barely see the edges of the sky, light filtering in to cast long shadows. We’re illuminated by the mushrooms—oh gods, so many mushrooms—that shed purple and yellow light while tiny creatures scurry around on the edges of the shadows. Some of them don’t necessarily stay there, fading in and out of the shadows if any one of us tries to focus on them.

The ravine walls are made of grey and black stone, the black crawling along the sheer cliffs and creating a spiderweb design across them. Shattered sections jut out every ten meters or so, but there’s a glassiness to the grey stone that makes me think climbing it would be difficult. Idly, I wander over to one of the walls and punch it. Rather than shatter, it hurts my hand and I feel skin split along my knuckles. Frowning, I pull back my hand and notice my skin knitting back together, blood dripping out.

“What the hell?” I’m used to hard metal, even hard rock. It doesn’t split my skin though, not even when it’s hard enough to withstand a punch.

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